Australian founder Daniel Dewar to tackle $2.5bn in music royalty black boxes with music technology startup Paperchain

01 August 2017

When a streaming service or performing rights organisation is unable to identify the rights owner to pay royalties to, unpaid royalties are held in “royalty black boxes”

The global value of these royalty black boxes is estimated to be $2.5bn

Paperchain has developed a product to connect rights owners to their unpaid royalties

Australian founder Daniel Dewar is basing Paperchain out of London to focus on the large publishing and recording industry opportunities in the US, UK and Europe

London, UK – Paperchain, a global music technology company, is aiming to solve the music industry’s problem of unpaid royalties by going after the growing amount of unidentified copyright owners.

When a streaming service or performing rights organisation is unable to identify the rights owner to pay royalties to, the unpaid royalties are held in “royalty black boxes”, until the songwriter or rights owner can be identified. If they are not identified after a period of time, the royalties are absorbed by the holding company or dispersed into the industry based on market share.

The global value of these royalty black boxes is estimated to be $2.5bn.

Paperchain founder and CEO, Daniel Dewar, says identifying and connecting the rights owner to the streaming service will mean royalties can start flowing back to songwriters and their publishers. “With the industry’s digital transformation and adoption of streaming, there’s been growing pains around collecting and processing the sheer amount of sales and royalty data being generated.”

“Some of the inefficient legacy practices, such as separating recording and composition licensing data, has been amplified by the increased data generation, leading to an accumulation of unidentified rights owners and unattributed royalties.”

Paperchain has been running closed beta testing with select labels, publishers and intermediaries for the past 12 months.

Founded in Sydney, Australia, Paperchain will be based out of London starting from August 2017 as the company grows its client base and finalizes its seed fundraising round.

Founded in 2016, Paperchain Inc. empowers music copyright owners with products and services to solve the problem of unpaid royalties. With focus being on the convergence of copyrights, royalties, data and technology, Paperchain’s core product engine allows rights owners to identify and claim unpaid royalties, lookup and validate catalogues against industry databases, and link composition rights data to master rights data.

Paperchain is the fastest and easiest way for creators to access their streaming revenue.